Imperas and Industry Articles

Inflection point for RISC-V: The 7th RISC-V workshop in Silicon Valley

Imperas participated in the 7th RISC-V workshop in Milpitas, California, with a talk and demonstrations.

Each workshop has a different feel to it, and this one seems to be the inflection point in RISC-V maturity. Whereas past workshops felt a bit like a revival tent meeting, with most everyone caught up in the religion of RISC-V, at this workshop there was also a strong...

As software complexity is increasing exponentially, companies must adopt better ways to address problems, as eventually the existing methods will no longer be sufficient. And, one serious failure changes everything for your business and your career. One lesson to be learned from SoC design and verification: A structured methodology makes execution predictable and reduces risk, benefits that argue for a more formalized approach within the embedded software development domain.

In the October issue of Embedded Systems Engineering, Imperas CEO, Simon Davidmann discusses the issues in porting operating systems to new SoC and hardware platforms and uses the case study of porting Linux to an Altera platform.

The 6th RISC-V Workshop was held May 8-11 in Shanghai. RISC-V is, of course, the open-source processor architecture invented and introduced by the University of California, Berkeley in 2014. The previous workshop, held last November in Silicon Valley, attracted around 350 participants; this workshop about the same.

The opening statement of the Imperas presentation at the workshop was "The size of the RISC-V market share will depend more on the software ecosystem than on specifics of RISC-V implementations." The meat of the presentation focused on modern embedded software development methodology, specifically on Continuous Integration Continuous Test (CI / CT) subset of the Agile methodology.

No one builds a chip without simulation, right? In this week’s Fish Fry, Amelia Dalton of Electronic Engineering Journal takes a closer look at the value of virtual prototypes to simulate embedded software. Simon Davidmann (CEO - Imperas) and Amelia chat about about why Simon thinks no one should design embedded software without simulation, and the benefits of using virtual platforms to develop a verification and test environment.

Brian Bailey of Semiconductor Engineering recently chaired a panel at DVCon on ESL.

Expecting the future to replicate the past always leads to surprises and when it comes to migration of abstraction for semiconductor design, the future remains unclear.

Brian interviewed several industry leaders with experience in the field and provides interesting insights into why ESL took a long time to get where it has...

Simon Davidmann, CEO of Imperas was quoted several times. For example Simon said: “Everyone is trying to do more with RTL, more design, more verification, more complexity, and they needed a better solution. The industry came up with a C++ class language (SystemC) and then tried to look at what they could do with it. What is needed is to move away from the EDA vendors trying to define ways to sell the technologies they have, to asking the question, ‘How are we going to design systems which are incredibly complex, containing many processors, many hardware blocks and more software than you can imagine?’ How can we design things in a better way? How do we verify things in a better way?”...

Brian Bailey of Semiconductor Engineering recently got several experts together for a round table discussion entitled:

The role of system-level verification is not the same as block-level verification and requires different ways to think about the problem.

The experts included Larry Lapides of Imperas, and also staff from Cadence, Mentor, and Breker Verification.

The discussion started with reflection on a keynote at DVCon this year that Wally Rhines, chairman and CEO of Mentor Graphics, gave. He said that if you pull together a bunch of pre-verified IP blocks, it does not change the verification problem at the system level. That sounds like a problem...

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Related Comments

Imperas with its OVP Fast Processor Models is addressing key issues in software development for embedded systems. We are happy to work with Imperas to ensure that high quality models are easily available to our worldwide customers, helping them to develop and test software faster and more easily using virtual platforms.

Hirohiko Ono, Senior Manager of the MCU Tools Marketing Department

Renesas Electronics Corporation

OVP was selected because of the ease with which models are built and the flexibility in interfacing to other tools. The availability of the ARM processor model we needed, and the open source nature of the OVP models, were also important factors.